SCAM Warning – Domain Renewal Group

We have received many complaints from our customers who have received letters from the Domain Renewal Group claiming to offer to renewal of their domain names they have registered.  They obtain information about individual domain names that are close to expiry.

It is not unusual for individuals who are busy with their day to day work to overlook which registrar the domain was registered with. The Domain Renewal Group try to take advantage of this fact. They feel it is quite legitimate to catch people off guard and scam them for money. A quick google search on their company turned up lots of information about this scam. In fact all the results I see in Google are complaints about this company rather than any services they provide.

If you read the letter carefully, you realise that they are using an approach called slamming, which tricks you into switching your domains to another company. Specifically, they are highlighting each domain that is due to expire and that I risks associated with losing the domain name unless you renew with them. They don’t highlight any risks such as losing all your email and website when you switch over to them.

Although the letter states that it is not a bill, it has been designed to look like an invoice. An interesting aside is that they offer other variants of your domain name in the hope they can SCAM you registered other domains too.

If you receive a letter like this from Domain Renewal Group or from anyone else contact your own registrar or the person who maintains your website before parting with any money.

WordPress 3 released

WordPress 3 has been released and although the new version isn’t an entirely new animal there are a couple of improvements that I have noticed.

Firstly, the MU (multi-user) version is now merged into the mainstream product. WordPress MU enables you to install a single version of WordPress for multiple sites. The multiple sites would then have the features same plugins. This seems to be aimed at organisations that want to offer users/members/staff their own blogs.

Version 3 now has “Custom Post Types”. Previously this was restricted to Posts and Pages. For example, let’s say you want to have a Parts catalogue: in 3 it’ll be possible to create a new type of post called “Parts” that will contain the appropriate fields. This is a significant improvement in capability and also allows wordpress sites to resemble a CMS without the need for hacking the back end.

WordPress 2.9 has an option allowing you to create category templates using the slug, i.e category-slug.php. In WordPress 3.0, you can create specific templates for each author. The function get_author_template(); has been expanded in wp-includes/theme.php.

The menu system has been enhanced with Ajax so that you will be able to drag and drop pages, posts and categories in a similar way to the widget management screen.

The existing default theme, a study in boredom, is much smarter, easily customisable and a long overdue improvement. The theme has Custom header, Custom Background, Clean Design, Multiple Widget Areas, Cascading Menus and a lot more.

Version 3 includes a number of other more minor changes, including allowing you to change the default user from “Admin” to your choice and easier management of a theme’s background graphic.

I’m a huge fan of WordPress but I don’t believe that this update, useful though it is, does enough to open it up to non-technical users. There’s still a lot to be done to encourage users to customise their blogs more radically and effectively – it’s still all too easy to identify a WordPress site within moments because even simple design changes require knowledge of CSS.

Lets see what WordPress 4 promises!. To stay updated with WordPress Development follow: http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/